160
The unavoidable biological limitations of the work force -evident both in its dependence on the natural cycle of sleeping and waking and in the debilitating effects of irreversible time over each individual's lifetime-are treated by the modern production system as strictly secondary considerations. As such, they are ignored in that system's official proclamations and in the consumable trophies that embody its relentless triumphant progress. Fixated on the delusory center around which his world seems to move, the spectator no longer experiences life as a journey toward fulfillment and toward death. Once he has given up on really living, he can no longer acknowledge his own death. Life insurance ads merely insinuate that he may be guilty of dying without having provided for the smooth continuation of the system following the resultant economic loss, while the promoters of the "American way of death" stress his capacity to preserve most of the appearances of life in his post-mortem state. On all the other fronts of advertising bombardment it is strictly forbidden to grow old. Everybody is urged to economize on their "youth-capital," though such capital, however carefully managed, has little prospect of attaining the durable and cumulative properties of financial capital. This social absence of death coincides with the social absence of life.

168
Tourism -- human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities -- is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees their equivalence. The modernization that has eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously eliminated any real space from it.

174
The self-destruction of the urban environment is already well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls "a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,'' is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile-the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance-has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever wider dispersal. Within this process various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around "distribution factories" -giant shopping centers erected in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking space. These temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they have engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the point of consuming itself.